If you want a cheap way to worsen ego weapons, make their pluses lower. An MoD of Extra Attacks with only +10 to-dam is still going to be good, but it's going to have a lot more trouble competing against artifacts than that same weapon with +15 or +20 to-dam.

The same doesn't really apply to ego armor though. There I think you'll need to attack the pvals and flags.

I guess another option would be to score ego item power the same way you score artifact power, and penalize the likelihood of generating a high-power ego item.

There is the matter of "harder game". To adress that, I really would like to (have Nick ) look into buffing monsters in more or less global ways. When zephyr hounds got cut to size, I rejoiced, but they had been the cheap way to make the dungeon dangerous. It could use being more dangerous.

From my personal (still somehow limited after all my games!) experience, I find the game is hard enough until @ reaches endgame power. Then @ is often fairly "invincible", and only falls due to hubris or carelessness. So maybe more monsters with native depth around DL90 that are even more dangerous than all the max danger monsters of the DL70s? If I'm not mistaken, the most dangerous non unique monsters in the game show up in the DL70s and the last one is like DL79 (Greater Balrog) (although maybe GWofBalance is DL84 or something). So maybe some new monsters, with native depths in the DL80s and/or 90s, or change the native depth on Reavers, Greatest Greater Demons and Greatest Dragons and make them even more terrible? Seems that the top topmost monsters should have their breath/spell rate higher than most other things (the most common seems to be 1 out of 5).

I suppose a really easy way to make the deeper dungeon more dangerous is to simply change some of the 1 out of 5 to 1 out of 3 or 2 on many of the toughest monsters. People say rShards aren't important? Make Gelugon breathe shards more often. Although I suppose it's good if the game has some elements which are, overall, less dangerous than others than trying to make them all really dangerous.

One of the problems of trying to keep the game challenging for super-vets is that invariably it will be even more unwelcoming to newcomers or casual/occasional players. Which brings up the mostly terrible idea of suggesting giving Angband difficulty settings.

Original Doom had 5 difficulty settings. In Easiest, @ took half the damage of all the other skill levels and all ammo pickups were doubled. Difficulty settings 2-4 were mostly differentiated only in the number of monsters in each. The most difficult one called Nightmare wasn't even remotely fair: cheat codes didn't work, monsters came back to life some time after being killed, and monsters were all much faster than in normal difficulty settings, and ammo pickups were doubled.

So maybe you could have 3 difficulty settings in a similar vein as to original Doom? The easiest would make @ receive half the amount of damage, and each backpack slot would hold 80 instead of 40, and max weight would be, I dunno, 210lbs instead of 180lbs. The next up would be the current, and default, difficulty setting and then a third option would increase all or some of the following: monster damage output, monster hitpoints, monster breath/spell frequency, powerful item generation/drop frequency, and dead monsters come back to life after a time . Wins on the easiest skill level wouldn't be postable to the leaderboards (or if postable, an asterisk denoting an easy road was taken).

I dunno, difficulty settings seems cheesy in a game like Angband. There should really only be one difficulty setting. Maybe, as an easter egg, pressing some annoying combination of keys when Angband loads, could display a secret difficulty settings screen with the above options, but it would be considered cheating to select a difficulty setting other than the default one, and the player would be warned of such. Wins selected on a non-main difficulty setting would not be uploadable to the ladder.

Or scratch all that, and make something tailor made to my personal interests : another birth option that halves the number of levels in the game, increases the number of dangerous levels, (ie. that contain OOD monsters and items), and reduces the number of levels with scarce monsters (how boring!), and reduce the frequency of of those small, square, maze levels.

Chance of good drops from monsters would maybe increase (I haven't decided on that point, it is probably enough to encounter more opportunities to get good drops and thus it not need be to increase drop chance). Vault generation stays the same, so if you are playing with Forced Descent, you will see half the number of vaults as a current Forced Descent game sees.

Hmm, maybe another option that halves vault generation and doubles drop chance from uniques. Did Smeagol get nerfed at some point? I haven't gotten a good item from him in ages. Lately it's a small sum of gold pieces. Or Wormtongue for that matter.

Zephyr hounds.. I'm not sure I've ever even seen these? Nevermind! It's actually nice to know there are still things in the game I don't know about! Lately I have been running into a lot of Aether hounds which are pretty nasty to actually try and fight. They are one of the few monsters a super powerful @ cannot safely take on, even with 4 immunities last game, when I was about to take on the final bosses, I had to abort taking on a pack (8 or 10?) after only successfully killing one. Time hounds at least fall relatively easily.